The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese
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Название: The Political Economy of Slavery
Автор: Eugene D. Genovese
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780819575272
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Even if we put aside these objections and examine investments in selected counties in 1860, the appalling state of plantation technology is evident. Table 1 presents the data from the manuscript returns for 1860. Of the 1,969 farmers and planters represented, only 160 (or 8 per cent) had more than $500 invested in implements and machinery. If we assume that a cotton gin cost between $100 and $125, the figures for the cotton counties suggest that all except the planters (twenty or more slaves) either did without a gin or had little else. Note that an increase in the slave force did not entail significant expansion of technique. As the size of slaveholdings increased in the cotton counties, the investments in implements increased also, but in small amounts. Only units of twenty slaves or more showed tolerably respectable amounts, and even these were poor when one considers the size of the estates.69
Gray has suggested that the poor quality of Southern implements was due only in part to slave inefficiency. He lists as other contributing factors the lack of local marketplaces for equipment, the ignorance of the small farmers and overseers, prejudice against and even aversion to innovations, and a shortage of capital in the interior.70 Each of these contributing factors itself arose from the nature of slave society. The weakness of the market led to a lack of marketplaces. The social structure of the countryside hardly left room for anything but ignorance and cultural backwardness, even by the standards of nineteenth-century rural America. The social and economic pressures to invest in slaves and the high propensity to consume rendered adequate capital accumulation impossible. The psychological factor—hostility to innovation—transcended customary agrarian conservatism and grew out of the patriarchal social structure.
The attempts of reformers to improve methods of cultivation, diversify production, and raise more and better livestock were undermined at the outset by a labor force without versatility or the possibility of increasing its productivity substantially. Other factors must be examined in order to understand fully why the movement for agricultural reform had to be content with inadequate accomplishments, but consideration of the direct effects of slave labor alone tells us why so little could be done.
TABLE 1
Median Value of Farm Implements and Machinery in Selected Counties, 1860a
NOTES
1 Cairnes, The Slave Power (London, 1863), p. 46; Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery (Washington, D.C., 1857), p. 4; Farmer’s Register, III (1863), 748–49. The best introduction to the subject is still Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918), Chap. XVIII.
2 See SQR, XIX (Jan. 1851), 221. Ruffin sometimes also argued this way.
3 Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York, 1933), p. 16; E. A. Davis (ed.), Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana: The Diary of B. H. Barrow (New York, 1943), pp. 86 ff.
4 “Medical Practice in the Old South,” SAQ, XXIX (April 1930), 160–61. See also Felice Swados, “Negro Health on Ante-Bellum Plantations,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, X (Oct. 1941), 460–61; and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt,” JNH, XLV (July 1960), 141–55.
5 “Probably at no time before the Civil War were fruits and vegetables grown in quantities sufficient to provide the population with a balanced diet,” writes John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York, 1958), p. 61. At that, slaves undoubtedly received a disproportionately small share of the output.
6 Infra, Chapter V.
7 W. O. Atwater and Charles D. Woods, Dietary Studies with Reference to the Negro in Alabama in 1895 and (Washington, D.C., 1897). Adequate animal proteins plus corn probably would have sufficed to prevent nutritional deficiencies. See C. A. Elvehjem, “Corn in Human Nutrition,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Research Institute (Washington, D.C., 1955), p. 83.
8 See J. Masek, “Hunger and Disease” in Josué de Castro (ed.), Hunger and Food (London, 1958).
9 Josué de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston, 1952), p. 48.
10 The Health of Slaves on the Southern Plantations (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), esp. pp. 159 ff.
11 The Theory of Economic Growth (Homewood, Ill., 1955). p. 33.
12 “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” JPE, LXVI (April 1958), 95–130, esp. Table 17. Reprinted in Conrad and Meyer, The Economics of Slavery and Other Econometric Studies (Chicago, 1964).
13 Other questions are also raised by the Conrad-Meyer price data; cotton statistics were not kept with the degree of accuracy required for sophisticated analysis. In any event, the authors have not demonstrated a significant increase in productivity at all. They show no increase for the depressed 1840s, but 20% for the 1850s. These results emerge from a certain carelessness in rounding off figures. Crop value per hand per dollar of slave price is indexed at .05 for 1840; .05 for 1850; and .06 for 1860. But if we carry out the arithmetic two more decimal places we get .0494 (1840), .0538 (1850), and .0562 (1860)—i.e., a 9% increase for the depressed 1840s and only 4% for the 1850s. These results are implausible and, in any case, contradict their own conclusions.
14 J. D. B. De Bow, Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (3 vols.; New Orleans, 1852–53), III, 62.
15 “Let no man be ashamed of labor; let no man be ashamed of a hard hand or a sunburnt face.” William W. Holden, Address Delivered Before the Duplin County Agricultural Society (Raleigh, N.C., 1857), p. 7.
16 Cornelius O. Cathey, Agricultural Developments in North Carolina, 1783–1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), pp. 54–55.
17 Southern Cultivator, V (Jan. 1847), 141.
18 Cf. S. Daniel Neumark, “Economic Development and Economic Incentives,” South African Journal of Economics, March 1958, pp. 55–63. For a discussion of this question as related to Greek slavery see Karl Polany’s brilliant essay on Aristotle in Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, III., 1957), p. 77.
19 Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology, XLVII (Jan. 1942), 557 ff.
20 Fowler McCormick, Technological Progress in American Farming (Washington, D.C., 1940), p. 9.
21 H. J. Habakkuk, “The Historical Experience on the Basic Conditions of Economic Progress,” in Léon H. Dupriez (ed.), Economic Progress (Louvain, 1955), pp. 149–69.
22 James H. Street, The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1957), p. 34.
23 Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery … in the United States During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Cal., 1931), Chap. I.
24 Cited by Ronald L. Mighell, American Agriculture: Its Structure СКАЧАТЬ